Valentine's Day Countdown: Eight Musicians Pick Their Favorite Love Songs

“Because of Frank Sinatra, but I’m not going to go into it. I like what the song says: When somebody loves you, it’s not good unless he loves you all the way. That’s pretty strong. Love is beautiful. I would never describe it as tragic. If you’re in love, it’s the most wonderful feeling in the world. The guy doesn’t have to be in love with you. It would help if you were very serious about it for him to love you but you can always just have a crush.”

“It’s not a Jeff Buckley love song but it’s got a great vocal and it always stuck with me. It’s romantic. It was a very sexy video, I remember. It has a desperation to it and I just love singing it. There’s something in the simplicity of a power ballad. The chorus is just huge. It’s epic. You know when it’s coming and you can’t wait for it. Usually it’s blue-collar-boy-meets-girl love story. It’s just rich. It sits in that great place in our memories. It feels good.”

“It’s a perfect expression of love, which is the purest level of pure consciousness. This concept of romantic love has messed us all up. Because we are capable of experiencing that from time to time, we are under the illusion that that is the optimum state. When I was younger, nobody told me the difference, so I wasted a lot of time in the quest for romantic love — keeping it around when it arrived and grieving its loss when it left. The wonderful thing about getting older is that I can see these things with a lot more clarity.”

“‘Die Neugierige’ is my favorite because I love beautiful tunes, but I also love the context of the words. In this song, there’s a young man who loves a girl but doesn’t know if she loves him. He’s walking along a brook to the mill where the girl lives and he asks the brook if she loves him too. It’s beautiful because the end of the story is that it turns out she doesn’t love him and he kills himself, but in this song he isn’t quite there yet. It’s an innocent type of love song.”

“When you want a love song it can be one that is very happy but I suppose it was happy but then it had an unhappy ending. There’s always a question mark of the love that has been lost. The tragic love, really. I think love is a sad thing but sometimes we like to be sad. It’s a nice emotion. Not tragic sad, but just sad. I think we like to find a little hurt sometimes because then the happiness is more extreme.”

“The poem comes out of that period after the First World War when there was tremendous nostalgia for those who were lost. The song was inspired by the poet watching his wife in the garden. It’s a very simple song, but it’s full of all sorts of poignant ideas, and I like singing it very much.”

“This is so easy for me. The reason I love it is because the lyrics absolutely fit my life so perfectly talking about everywhere I go, I see you and you’re with me. My husband and I both have very busy calendars and we both travel, so we’re always in different cities, sometimes together and sometimes apart, so this is the perfect song for us. My dream when I was young was to be a backup singer for Billy Joel, so pop music is like comfort food. You go back immediately to that time and space and you remember the smells, the people you were with and what you were feeling. It’s sort of your touchstone, so it elicits a lot of emotions.”